Recently, it has been widely reported that mobile devices are the new leader in content. Whereas people used to consume the majority of their content through television and desktop websites, people are more often turning to their mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, tablets, PDAs, smartphones, wearables, etc.) to view electronic content. People are also increasingly viewing mobile content through non-browser mobile apps, such as social networking mobile applications.
Currently, in the context of mobile applications, when a user selects a website link within a mobile application, the app opens a “webview” within the current view portal, retrieves content of the requested web page from a remote web server, and loads and assembles the web page for the user to view. The app also usually enables the user to click a back button, e.g., an “x,” or some other user element to close the webview to return to the mobile application in which the webview had been opened. Notably, the web page is loaded within an in-app browser of the application, such as a social networking application, using content that is hosted exogenous to the application. For example, if a user is browsing a feed of a social networking application and clicks on an article, such as a Huffington Post article, the social networking application will open a light browser within the app, request (“call”) the article from a Huffington Post web server, and load the page within the browser within the social networking application.
One downside to in-app webviews is that they are traditionally very slow (sometimes taking as long as 10 seconds to load a full web page), they have high rates of crashes and users aborting, and they also typically do not pass through cookies, user data, or other sign-in data. In view of the downsides of in-app webviews, some social networks are now experimenting with implementing content hosting systems to actually host web content to be clicked on from within the social network's application. The social networks are touting that doing so may improve the speed of loading content within their applications, and that they can do so while maintaining publishers' and advertisers' ability to buy and sell ads within the content, despite the content being hosted by the social network. The social networks are encouraging publishers to host their content on the social networks' content hosting systems by using both positive and negative incentives. For example, social networks that are uniquely large may be leveraging their ability to alter their algorithms for determining what content appears within the social network's news feed based on whether the publisher has opted-in to the social network's content hosting system. In other words, some social networks may have the ability to “traffic shape” away from web, and toward their own content hosting ecosystem. This may cause a precipitous drop in social-network-referred page views for non-partners (i.e., publishers that are not opted-in to the ecosystem).
To publishers, this regime of social-network-hosted content means that some mobile traffic will be sold through actual mobile, vs. through a regime established by the social networks. This may involve publishers maintaining two different sales systems: one for traditional mobile traffic, and one for managing content delivered through the social network's ecosystem. Joining the social network's content hosting system may require the publishers to agree to rendering the content natively through the social network's app, using social network's ad servers, abiding by the social network's policies and formats, and enabling the social network to act as the remnant monetization provider at the social network's desired revenue share share. Such a scenario may prevent publishers from rendering content in their own formats, and may prevent publishers from performing recirculation and native advertising and content marketing.
Accordingly, a need exists for systems and methods for facilitating fast and configurable distribution of website content to mobile applications. More specifically, a need exists for enabling selective distributing or syndicating of website content through mobile applications using templatized, cached versions of web-, mobile-, and app-optimized content. The present disclosure is therefore directed to systems and methods for improving the distribution of website content using CDN hosting of templatized, cached versions of web-, mobile-, and app-optimized content.